talk-the reward: a quick death instead of a part-by-part dismemberment.
Sasaki told Tipaldi to get him cleaned up. “You can’t expect a lady like Officer Orzo to look at such a mess.”
Tipaldi found a couple towels and wrapped what was left of Mdoba’s hands. Maggie stayed planted where she was, her back turned on the ugliness.
I wiped the sweat off my face, and spoke slow and clear. “You work for Simba.”
“Yes,” Mdoba answered.
“When did you start working for Simba?”
He couldn’t answer, the pain too great. Tipaldi slapped him lucid. “Two years ago,” he croaked.
“Why?”
Again he couldn’t answer. Tipaldi slipped him a needleful of morphine. I waited a few, until he started getting happy. “Why did you start working for Simba?” I repeated.
“He paid well.”
“What did he want from you?”
“He wanted somebody high up in Bandur’s outfit to pass him information on what we were doing. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a traitor or nothing, but the money was good. Besides, I was hired by Papa Bandur, not that pussy kid of his.”
“What other kinds of work did you do for Simba?”
Mdoba went into a coughing fit. His belly rolled with every hack. After a glass of water, he was talking again. “I was helping him get his shipping company going. Shit, it was a sweet deal, Juno. He has some bitch on the Orbital that buys up people, ships ’em to the mines.”
“What kind of people?”
Mdoba had entered a morphine euphoria. His words were coming out fluidly now. “All kinds. It don’t matter. Kids are good, because they’re easy to kidnap. Some people even sell their kids cheap.”
“What happens to them?”
“They send ’em to the mines. From what I hear, the ship captains keep the pretty ones for themselves. You ever heard of a harem? They used to have ’em on Earth. They knew what they was doing back then. A harem’s when you got all these women and they do whatever you say; they have to please you. You know what I’m saying? Beat ’em, rape ’em-whatever you want.”
“You don’t treat women like that!” My piece was in his mouth.
Mdoba ranted garbled pleadings, begging mercy.
Tipaldi and Sasaki didn’t move to stop me. Maggie said, “Juno.”
My hand tremor spread over my entire body. Sweaty shivers ran up and down. My face burned red. I pulled my piece free, revealing a newly chipped tooth in Mdoba’s blubbering mouth. I stepped outside and sucked early evening air. My muscles adrenaline-twitched. I struggled to calm my out-of-control thoughts.
Maggie stayed next to me with a look of pity on her face. I’d spent a lifetime proving I wasn’t weak by exacting brutality in abundance, and in the end, I came off pitiful. I gave her my weapon and headed back in.
Mdoba was as calm as could be expected. Sasaki had moved to the stove to prepare tea. Tipaldi was nursing his bruised knuckles with ice from the freezer.
I took a place on the far side of the kitchen-safely out of throttling distance from Mdoba. I concentrated on self-control. “What do they do with the rest of the slaves?”
Mdoba answered, “They make ’em work.”
“Don’t they have robots to do the mining?”
“They need people to run the robots. The more people, the more machines they can run. They don’t need just miners, though. They need people to grow food and shit, same as here.”
“Why can’t they hire labor? Twenty percent of Lagarto is looking for work.”
“This way’s cheaper. Why pay for something when you can get it for free?”
“Aren’t they afraid of getting caught?”
Mdoba’s speech was getting labored. “Who’s going to catch them? Even if somebody found out, it would take years for the message to get to Earth or anybody else that can do anything about it. By the time they send somebody out here to investigate, twenty or thirty years go by.”
“How were you helping Simba get started?”
Mdoba turned to Tipaldi. “More. I need more.”
Tipaldi administered a morphine booster. Mdoba instantly became more relaxed.
I started back in. “How were you helping Simba?”
“He told me how he wanted his own ship. I thought he was crazy. I don’t know how he did it, but he bought a fucking ship. I’d like to see Bandur pull that off. Maybe Papa coulda done it. I seen that man do some amazing shit, but the kid ain’t got it in him.”
“Simba needed approval from the city.”
“That’s right. He wanted me to handle it. He needed somebody that knew Koba. It was a test. You know, to see how I did. If it went well, he was going to see about putting me in charge of Bandur’s operations when he took them over.”
“So you took vids of board members.”
“You know about those? Yeah, it was easy. Everybody’s got something they don’t want people knowing about. I took vids and used them to get the board to vote the way Simba wanted.”
The questions were ticking off my tongue in a strictly professional manner. “What about Peter Vlotsky?”
“I caught that prick screwing hookers, but he didn’t care. It took me a while to figure out that he was getting paid by an offworld shipping company to kill Simba’s business proposal dead. I needed him. He was the fucking chairman. Without his okay there was nothing we could do. He’s got some kind of veto power.”
“What did you do then?”
“Simba gave me the go-ahead to play it rough with Vlotsky. Simba said he couldn’t compete with offworld money, so he said we’d have to use intimidation to get what we wanted.”
“You went after his family.”
“Right. I’d already done my homework on the family. I told him about how Vlotsky had a wife and a son, but the problem with his son was that he was in the Army. How do you whack a guy in the Army? He’s surrounded by guys with guns. So Simba told me to go for the wife, but I told him that if Vlotsky doesn’t care about his wife seeing him fucking another woman then he probably won’t care if we kill her either. We’d be doing the guy a fucking favor.”
“So what did you decide to do?”
“When I mentioned that Vlotsky’s kid was stationed at the base upriver, he told me he knew somebody stationed there.”
“Jhuko Kapasi.”
“You know about him, too? What the fuck are you asking me all these questions for?”
Pieces were coming into focus. “Go on.”
He looked at Tipaldi, not needing to ask. Tipaldi gave him another mini-injection. Mdoba looked at his wrecked hands then closed his eyes. “I checked out this Kapasi. He was a hustler-got sent up to the Zoo for a gambling deal that went bad. He got early release from prison and was sent into the Army. It turned out he was in Vlotsky’s unit.”
“How did Simba know Kapasi?”
“He told me that Kapasi sold him some POWs-farmers that brought a good price when he sold them to the mines.”
“What about Kapasi’s sister? Did he sell her to Simba?”
“Yeah, he sold her, too. He ran that crazy gambling scheme that blew up in his face, and he had to pay off some big debts before he went to jail, so he sold her to Simba. That was when Simba was just getting started on the slavery thing.”
My brain locked the pieces into place. “So you approached Kapasi.”
“Yeah. I told him I’d pay him to snuff Lieutenant Vlotsky. He got all excited about it. He told me how big a prick Lieutenant Vlotsky was and how the lieutenant screwed his whole unit over on some operation. I thought he was onboard. He’d kill Chairman Vlotsky’s kid, and I’d go tell him he’s next if he doesn’t vote our way, but Kapasi
